Worth reading: ‘Beyond Janjaweed’ Understanding the militias of Darfur

This report, released this month by the Small Arms Survey, on the people who were recruited as proxy militias by the Sudanese government in Darfur, is well worth the read. Its author is Julie Flint (who wrote Darfur: A Short History of a Long War with Alex de Waal), and while I don’t agree with all the characterizations she makes in the report, it is an enlightening read.

The report also serves to remind me just how far to the – I don’t know what it is – right, left, outer space (?) –  Mamdani’s work on Darfur is. Flint can hardly be characterized as a supporter of the “Save Darfur” narrative of the conflict, and yet she is still light years closer to it than Mamdani. You can see this in the report’s executive summary where she stresses that:

“The causes of the conflict in Darfur are complex and deep-rooted, involving political and economic marginalization, failing institutions (especially security and judicial institutions), environmental degradation, population pressure, and ubiquity of small arms as a result of regional conflicts, uncontrollable borders, and past arms distributions by the government to militias such as the murahaliin.”

But, crucially, she continues that:

“[A] ‘racial’ dimension introduced to the conflict in the 1980s, to support an ideology based on ‘Arab’ supremacy, has sharpened into an ethnic divide in which the militias are predominantly pastoralists claiming an Arab identity and the rebels predominantly settled, or semi-settled, communities self-identified as ‘Africans’.”

Where the report shines is with Flint’s reporting of the different responses to the attempted recruitment by the Sudanese Government of different groups, and of different individuals within those groups. While most advocates have, for some time now, been clear that when they talk about the conflict in short-hand terms of Arab vs. African, they are not meaning to cast the entire Arab population of Darfur with one brush, these caveats have been easy to dismiss by critics as lacking in substance. Flint brings that substance out. Darfur advocates would be well advised to start integrating the stories of resistance against the Government by Arab individuals and groups in Darfur, into the narrative they tell of the conflict – just as the narrative of Rwanda is now rounded out with stories of resistance by Hutu moderates.

The report also highlights, yet again, the long shadow cast by the DPA disaster, in which it was somehow assumed that the Government of Sudan would represent the interests of the groups from whom they recruited. While acknowledging that some of the militias used the Government for their own purposes, the overall picture Flint paints is one which shows the groups from whom the Government recruited were exploited, rather than served by, Khartoum.

While pretty tough on the rebel groups, and more sympathetic to the Government’s “inability” to control the forces they unleashed than I would be, Flint manages to maintain a position that points the central finger of responsibility back at Khartoum. In so doing, she shows that it is possible to immerse yourself in “complexity” while not forsaking your basic moral compass of right and wrong.